Arnaud De Borchgrave: Israel's Embarrassing history

The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of
independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced
exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any
suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror.

Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the
media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook
for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to
Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the
“expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many
Arab-owned lands.”

Textbooks for Jewish Israelis in the same grade make no such verbal
concession. But Israel’s “new wave” historians have been combing through
fresh material now available from the British mandate period and Israeli
archives that document the history of Israel before and after it became a
state. Long-lasting myths are being debunked.

Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and Haifa University lecturer, whose
ninth book is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” documents how
Israel was born with lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian
inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years.
During the British mandate (1920-1948), Zionist leaders concluded
Palestinians, who owned 90 percent of the land (with 5.8 percent owned by
Jews), would have to be forcibly expelled to make a Jewish state possible.
Pappe quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, addressing
the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, as saying, “I am for compulsory
transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”

Pappe outlines Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), which followed earlier plans A, B
and C, and included forcible expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians from
both urban and rural areas with the objective of creating by any means
necessary an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab presence. The methods
ranged from a campaign of disinformation -- “get out immediately because
the Jews are on their way to kill you” -- to Jewish militia attacks to
terrorize the Palestinians.

The first Jewish militia attacks, says Pappe, began before the May 1948
end of the British mandate. In December 1947 two villages in the central
plain -- Deir Ayyub and Beit Affa -- were raided, and their panicked
Palestinian inhabitants fled. Jewish leaders gave the order to drive out
as many Palestinians as possible on March 10, 1948. The terror campaign
ended six months later. Pappe writes 531 Palestinian villages were
destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities were emptied of their
Palestinian inhabitants.

There is no doubt in Pappe’s mind that Plan D “was a clear-cut case of an
ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a
crime against humanity.”

Plan Dalet began in the rural hills on the western slopes of the Jerusalem
mountains halfway on the road to Tel Aviv, according to Pappe. It was
called Operation Nachshon, and served as a model for massive expulsions
using terror tactics. Pappe also details what he calls the “urbicide of
Palestine” that included attacking and cleansing the major urban centers
of Tiberias, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Safad and what he calls the “Phantom City of
Jerusalem” once Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied its western
Arab neighborhoods in April 1948. The British did not interfere.

Lobbied by the World Zionist Organization and its guiding spirit Chaim
Weizmann, who became the first president of Israel (1949-52), the British
decided in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1917 Balfour
Declaration. This was a letter from the British Foreign Secretary to Lord
Rothschild (Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild), the leader of the British
Jewish community, for relay to the Zionist Federation. The British also
pledged indigenous Arab rights would be protected as they divvied up the
Ottoman Empire.

The myth was then created of “a land without people for a people without a
land” even though the “empty land” had a flourishing Palestinian Arab
population. The U.N. partition plan of Nov. 29, 1947, gave the Jews 56
percent of Palestine, with one-third of the population, while making
Jerusalem an international city. The Jewish part included the most fertile
land and almost all urban areas....

More Comments:

omar ibrahim baker -
10/19/2007

To some it might be embarrassing, to others it seems inevitable to many it seems a closed chapter.
It is NOT and many will rue the day they went along with the Zionist dream!
To us it is a partial chronicle of the crime and is the turning point in the dreamers'career ...ultimately it will go down in history as "Israel's FATAL mistake"

Serge Lelouche -
8/18/2007

Omar! Glad to have you back! I had heard you became a suicide bomber . . .

Arnold Shcherban -
8/12/2007

So what?
Every legitimate definition is times by times used illegitimately for economic, political, or ideological profits.
Thus to transform that "belief" of yours to even a REASONABLE doubt, you have to get some conflicting evidence.

Frank Ly -
8/10/2007

"Ethnic Cleansing"

Wikipedia definition:

"...This Orwellian term has since become still more Orwellian, because it is occasionally used as a claim of war crimes, when no war crimes actually exist. For example, ethnic cleansing has become improperly used to describe a situation wherein poorer ethnic groups are being displaced economically, by other, generally more affluent ethnic groups."

I believe that definition is an apt description of the posted Agence France Press article.